PUC Says Utilities Stall Merger Review

State Public Utilities Commission staff members allege that San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison have stalled their review of the utilities’ proposed merger by ignoring data requests.

SDG&E; and Edison have ignored one data request for nearly 200 days, according to Philip Weismehl, an attorney with the PUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates. The division represents the public in the PUC’s review of Edison’s proposed merger with SDG&E; and filed the allegations Friday. Nearly 30 data requests have been ignored for 30 or more days, and a number of others are more than 15 days behind, Weismehl said.

The Division of Ratepayer Advocates might ask commissioners to extend the current, late-November deadline for discovery, Weismehl said.

In a recent filing with the PUC, the ratepayer advocacy division credited SDG&E; for responding faster than Edison.

Edison spokesman Lew Phelps on Tuesday denied that Edison was slow in responding to the data requests. Late last week, Edison determined that 15 of the disputed data requests “had been answered, anywhere from one to five months ago,” Phelps said. “Several others were in the process of being responded to, and they have that information by now.”

Phelps said the Division of Ratepayer Advocates underestimated the difficulty of fulfilling some requests. “They gave us 14 calendar days to respond to one question that required . . . (the equivalent of) 12 people working continuously for one month,” Phelps said.

So far, Edison has “responded to more than 6,000 data requests” by various intervenors, Phelps said. The company has turned over 500,000 pages of evidence, he said. The data requests were generated by parties involved with continuing state and federal regulatory reviews.

“We’ve generally had significant problems with data requests,” Weismehl said Tuesday. The data requests that have not been filled “have just been stifled without any seeming reason,” Weismehl said. “We’ve got a commission-imposed deadline for doing our work . . . but we’re still waiting around for information. It’s really impeding our ability to do our job.”

According to PUC rules, Edison and SDG&E; are supposed to respond to data requests within 10 working days when the request is relatively simple. More complicated requests are supposed to be filled within 15 working days.

But “it appears that the minimum response time Edison is now proposing is approximately one month,” Weismehl said.

Weismehl complained that Edison’s slow response to data requests is preventing his staff and paid consultants from preparing “even basic testimony.”

The division is supposed to present its testimony before Jan. 15, 1990, but “the delays are effectively precluding our ability to do those studies because we don’t have the information that we need,” Weismehl said.

Some of the Division of Ratepayer Advocates’ concerns were to have been addressed during a Thursday meeting at the PUC’s San Francisco headquarters building. Tuesday’s earthquake in Northern California may change those plans.

Michael Shames, executive director of Utility Consumers Action Network, a San Diego-based consumer group, said his data requests have largely been filled--but that Edison has in the process swamped him with useless information. “I receive avalanches of useless materials, and they withhold the useful material,” Shames said.